“Train’s gone, son.”
Larry McMurtry, the American author who wrote so eloquently about the changing West, died on March 25, 2021, at the age of eighty-four. He is perhaps best known for the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Lonesome Dove, but he published both fiction and non-fiction over a long and prolific career. From his first novel, Horseman Pass By, here is a beautiful and evocative description of a warm evening on a Texas ranch, sitting on the porch watching the train go by as the day fades.
“Granddad was an old man then, and he worked hard days. By eight or eight-fifteen he was tired of sitting up. Around that time the nightly Zephyr flew by, blowing its loud whistle to warn the station men in Thalia. The noise cut across the dark prairie like the whistling train itself. I could see the hundred lighted windows of the passenger cars, and I wondered where in the world the people behind them were going night after night. To me it was exciting to think about a train. But the Zephyr blowing by seemed to make Granddad tireder; it seemed to make him sad. He told me one time that it reminded him of nights on roundup, long years ago. On quiet nights he and the other cowboys would sit around the fires, telling stories or drawing brands in the dirt. Some nights they would camp close to a railroad track, and a train would go by and blow its whistle at the fires. Sometimes it scared the cattle, and sometimes it didn’t, but it always took the spirit out of the cowboys’ talk; made them lonesomer than they could say. It made them think about womenfolk and fun and city lights till they could barely stand it. And long years after, when the last train would go by, Granddad got restless. He would stretch, and push his old rope-bottom chair up against the house. ‘Train’s gone, son,’ he said to me. ‘It’s bedtime.‘”